Most people tend to assume that content marketing is just an inbound marketing tool, but that’s like saying butter is only good with bread. (Wrong, butter is good with everything!) True, content marketing is an important part of inbound marketing, but did you know that content marketing is also a customer service tool?

Think about the basic purposes of content marketing: besides conversions, content marketing is good for building trust, building relationships, and educating your customers. Throw in problem solving and that list would sound an awful lot like a customer service department’s goals. Let’s unpack these points and see how content marketing can help customer service.

Building trust

Think for a moment about your favorite teacher or professor. Why was that teacher your favorite? I’ll bet it had something to do with them building trust with you and as they taught you more, you trusted them more. The same principle holds true in business—educate your customers and they will trust you.

Build a reputation for creating excellent content—content that’s more focused on helping your customers than on selling your products. The less you try to sell your product in your content marketing, the more your customers will be attracted to your brand. They’ll trust you and then they’ll open their wallets for you. In doing this, you’ll also be attracting better customers—customers who aren’t buying from you just on the basis of price.

Building relationships

Building trust with your customers builds relationships with your customers. Good content can be the difference between the customer who buys your product once and the customer that follows your blog, interacts with your brand on social media, and purchases your products over and over again.

By creating powerfully engaging content, you can not only get people to become customers, but you can keep them as customers and building customer loyalty. Developing customer loyalty means a big increase in the lifetime value of your customers as their more likely to keep buying from you, and refer you to their friends.

Educating customers

Would you like to have fewer customer service calls and complaints? Content marketing is all about educating customers and educated customers call your contact center less because they can solve their own problems. Consider answering common questions and offering tips and best practices about your products/services on the company blog—or create a special blog for this purpose.

When your customers do call, your customer care specialists will have a library of content available to share with customers. This library serves three functions:

1-It helps inform your customer service personnel about the ins and outs of the products and services they are supporting. If they don’t remember something, a simple search will bring up what they need.
2- For some issues, customer services reps may not even need to spend the time explaining how to fix the problem and can simply say “try the steps listed on this page [link].” This saves time so your customer service reps can help more people in less time.
3- If your customer service folks are armed with good content, then after solving the customer’s problem, they may be able to upsell the customer onto a fancier service, or at the very least, give the customer some collateral to get them thinking about upgrading something.

Add all this up, and it’s clear that content marketing isn’t just about bringing in new customers—it’s also good for keeping your current customers. Getting new customers is always important, but it costs more to get new ones than it does to keep your existing customers. Thus, it certainly makes sense to use your content (that you’re already creating for inbound marketing) and repurpose it to help retain the clients you already have.